Singing Within

I had tea with the tenor Mark Padmore one recent afternoon, backstage at the Berlin Philharmonic as it rained and hailed outside. He wore a black sweater over a light gray dress shirt and a sleek bronze bracelet, and had just finished a rehearsal with the violinist Pekka Kuusisto and members of the Karajan Academy, for young orchestral musicians.Padmore praised Kuusisto for his energy and “abandon” more than once during the interview. At the concert, though, I thought Padmore stole the show with the unfamiliar, surrealist, and refined “Paroles tissées” by Witold Lutosławski, for tenor and chamber orchestra, to words by Jean-François Chabrun.